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From: iandale@superior.carleton.ca (Ian Dale)
Subject: Re: Sandwich in Mandarin = Three Meijis
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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 20:28:03 GMT
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Sze-Wing Tang (stang@orion.oac.uci.edu) wrote:
: In article <38evm2$prq@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu>,
: Hung Jung Lu <hlu@wam.umd.edu> wrote:
: >In Mandarin, the translation for the English word
: >"sandwich" means literally "three Meijis"
: >(San1 Min2 Zhi4 in Pinyin.)

: In Cantonese, 'sandwich' is 'saam1 man4 zi6' (lit: three
: language govern)(or san1 wen4 zhi4 in Mandarin)

Obviously both the Mandarin rendition of the first posting and the
Cantonese rendering posted later represent the use of the characters
in question to represent the sound of the borrowed word 'sandwich',
rather than to represent its meaning.

The question is: In transliterating foreign words into characters
which approximate their pronunciation, how does the Chinese
transliterator decide which of the (sometimes many) available
characters to use? A priori, one can think of various criteria.

1) semantic verisimilitude: This doesn't seem to have applied here. A
substantial metaphoric leap would seem necessary to equate a sandwich
with "three Meijis" (or "three enlightened rule(r)s", shall we say, to
better approximate the individual meanings of the two later
characters) or "three language govern" (or "three literary rule(r)s"
to accentuate the parallelism between the two renderings). On the
other hand, it may be that none of the other character combinations
that produced an acceptably close pronunciation fit the meaning any
better. One could at least suppose that the 'san' element ("three")
could represent the three components of a sandwich; but this may be
happenchance.

2) semantic irrelevance: This is the converse of the above and makes a
certain amount of sense to me. That is, if one is reading rapidly
along a text, taking in the meanings of the characters, the appearance
of a set of characters that make no sense put together might be taken
to be a signal that their usual meanings are to be ignored and that
attention is to be paid to their sounds instead. This particular
example would seem at first glance a suitable illustration of this
principle.

3) simplicity: This fits well here. All four characters in question
require few strokes to write. The first character ('San1') only takes
three strokes, the second character in Mandarin (Min2, according to
the initial poster, but also rendered as ming in some dictionaries)
takes just eight; the second character in the Cantonese rendering, if
I have interpreted the poster's intention correctly, just four
strokes; and the third character (zhi4/zi6) eight strokes.

4) frequency: That is, the relative frequency of the selected
character compared with others that might have been chosen instead. I
really have no idea whether this fits here or not.  Certainly the
character for "three" must be a very common one in absolute terms. And
doubtless the ones for "bright" (Mandarin) and "language" (Cantonese)
are too. As for "rule" (or "govern"), this seems moot to me.

5) personal preference or happenstance: i.e., none of the above. This
may turn out to be the case upon examination of additional examples.


Can someone who knows more about this subject elucidate for us
further? Perhaps additional examples of transliterated loanwords would
be helpful. Or the characters used to represent foreign proper names, whether
of places or people.

                                                    -- Ian









: P
